The Struggle Is Real.

It’s hard continuing to get the feel that she is an awkward flyer.

There just isn’t that much posture reference for superheroes who aren’t very good at flying. In this case, for both yesterday and today’s post I wanted to give the feeling that Sauron flies like a falcon or a bat…sort of “swoopy” and very wing based…while our protagonist just sort of flies like many superheroes do, by just defying the rules of physics. Certainly flying like a bird takes a whole lot of instinct, precision, and practice, which is what I was after in terms of his posture.

Cap on the other hand was supposed to have a posture of surprise, in the last post, like a person who is just learning to rollerblade and has been startled. For today, I wanted to convey that Sauron is very much NOT flying anymore…he’s kind of grappling, taking his wings out of the equation. At the same time I wanted our hero to look like she is staying aloft by her flying power, but kind of wobbly…like she can fly, or wrestle a dinosaur person, but not both at the same time.

This, oddly, is actually very much wrapped up in the state of affairs at school. Yesterday was a “shortened day”, where the students go home early, and the teachers hang around for an hour and a half in Professional Development Training. Then after that, we had another hour of Staff Meetings. Sadly, none of the meetings were all that useful or productive…being basically three hours of my life that weren’t well used.

More importantly, it shortened the length of my classes…meaning that we did not in fact finish Chapter Six of “Lord of the Flies”, and are still very much working our way through the “Beast From Air.” The shortened days are always rough on the realities of lesson planning, and in this case, really thrown a wrench into the scheduling. With that in mind, I really wish that we had more meaningful or useful trainings and meetings…I’d rather stay on my planned schedule in class, and potentially work a harder day, than be bored in a meeting that I have actually had presented to me eighteen times prior.

This kind of thing is very much the reality of modern public educational time. It’s a known fact that training time and planning time are important to teachers, but it’s a real unknown quantity how they might be constructed well. This is especially true now that we are down two fifths of our administrative staff…thy are simply stretched too thin at this point to really put together solid presentations, since they are each doing significantly more work each day.

Today we should, in class at least, get through with Chapter Six, and be in the midst of drafting the second paragraph of this week’s expository composition. That’s also an odd scheduling issue, since the majority of students attempt to get about seventy five percent of their work done on the day that work is due. That makes a real case for “on demand” assignments, except that “on demand” assignments can only be so complex, given the time and resource constraints.

Much like the struggle against Sauron in the Savage Land, the struggle with juggling time as an asset in public education is very, very real.

On that subject, another teacher watching me draw this while at the meetings asked a question. “She’s super strong, right? Stronger than a dinosaur, definitely, right? Why doesn’t she just chuck him into orbit?” It was a solid question, with a very simple answer.

See…the limiting factor is that she’s flying, and flies poorly. If she chucks Sauron super hard, like Orbital Toss hard, she will be hurled backward and downward, into the ground, with equal force. Even when you’re nigh invulnerable, you tend to try and avoid putting big craters in the ground, with you as the thing hitting the ground really hard. Superman can do the Flying Orbital Toss because he flies well, and can brace himself with equal force against the Toss, like a hockey player taking a slapshot.